


We Can Make the World Stop

by lexicale



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-15 06:03:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lexicale/pseuds/lexicale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After 7x06, Dean and Sam are separated. Dean is at Bobby's, nursing a hangover, when he hears of Sam's arrest. He's over five hundred miles away and able to do nothing but watch the television when the hell in Sam's head breaks him completely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Can Make the World Stop

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [ohsam comment meme challenge](http://ohsam.livejournal.com/340216.html).

Sam took off running, just like always.

Dean thought he’d spent a lifetime watching Sam’s back, watching him run. Watching him leave. Once, Dean would have chased him down. He remembered Sam’s little toddler legs, faster than they looked, working hard to propel Sam out of the motel room and straight into traffic, Dean charging after him with arms out stretched.

It became harder to chase, the older that Sam got.

His legs grew and his head filled with knowledge and his eyes caught on the horizon, fell in love with it, and after that, Dean could never keep up.

God knew he’d tried.

There had been a time when Dean was younger that he hadn’t understood it at all. He’d blamed Sam. He’d seen his little brother yelling, fighting with their dad for independence, for safety, for something better than he’d been given, and all Dean had heard was _I hate this life, I hate what you’ve given me, and most of all I hate you._ And when Sam had looked to him, turned with those puppy eyes, looking for his brother, looking for support, looking for anything, Dean had slammed the door in his face.

And locked it behind him.

And Dean had held onto that anger for five long years. 

He wasn’t a twenty six year old punk anymore, though. He’d found out things, had the untarnished figure of his father tarnished, had the life he loved turned sick and sour with his brother, the kid he’d loved and raised, offered up to him to kill -- to hunt like a monster. He’d run and fought, been shoved into Hell and to places even worse and he was so damned tired. He could understand now. He could understand, having played house for a year, having looked at a boy that could have been his son in another life, and he could see now all the places his own father had failed.

And how Sam had just needed someone who gave a shit about him. Someone who could look him in the eyes and tell him the truth.

Of course, it turned out that Dean was _exactly_ that twenty six year old punk. Thirty-three and something almost like a family man and he was still some stupid ass punk, lying to his brother, telling him he trusted him and then thrusting the knife in when his back was turned. People said it was inevitable -- you grow up to be your parents. Once, Dean would have killed for that, but right now, three days out from Ankeny and laid up in Bobby’s living room, nursing a hangover, all he wanted was John Winchester alive again just to give him a kick of buckshot to the chest.

“You still kickin’?” Bobby asked, somewhere to the right -- probably the kitchen, Dean’s aching brain helpfully supplied. He had a mostly melted icepack over his eyes and no intention to move it, so he went with that assumption.

“Mnn,” he grunted in response, one hand dangling over the edge of the couch, fingers brushing the dirty floor. He remembered he and Sam clumping around after a hunt, sitting around and ribbing each other, tracking mud everywhere and Bobby only muttering because he enjoyed it. Dean remember Sam before Hell. Before Jessica. But he didn’t remember a Sam that had ever really been happy.

“Well, I got a cheeseburger here, and I suggest you force it down your gullet -- I also suggest that next time you don’t drink your way through more than one bottle of liquor in a sitting, and if you _do,_ go buy your own. Don’t go diggin’ around through an ailin’ man’s booze cabinet.”

 _“Ailing,”_ Dean scoffed.

“You want the cheeseburger and the Advil? Or do you want me to go and figure out if my old frying pans can double as a drum set?”

Dean winced.

“Your troubles are great and genuine and I apologize for my unforgivable transgressions,” he said quickly, or tried to. It ended up a little mumbly.

“Good,” Bobby gruffed, and Dean could hear him treading over, setting down some items on the worn coffee table. Dean sat up slowly with a long, protracted groan, feeling his head throb like his heart had decided to relocate to his skull and he lowered the ice pack, unsteadily placing it on the table. Bobby had left a tall glass of water and an old chipped plate with a flat looking McDonald’s cheeseburger sitting in the middle. On the edges were two red pills.

Dean reached for them, putting them on his tongue and washing them back with the water, which at the moment he sorely wished was brandy. 

That thought gave some credence to Sam’s theory that Dean had been swimming a little too deep into the bottle recently, but Dean wrinkled his nose and ignored it. Instead, he grabbed the plate from the table with a little more vigor than was strictly necessary, leaning back against the couch to eat the greasy burger. His stomach churned at the smell, but once he took his first bite his body seemed to wake up to the idea that food was a good thing and he had to temper himself, keep himself from wolfing it down.

“So,” Bobby said, less of a question and more of a statement, just standing there with arms crossed. Dean looked up, mouth full of half chewed burger, his look distinctly sullen.

“What do you want from me, old man?” he asked, recalcitrant and wanting to be left to some peace. It was enough that Sam needed to be on his case 24/7, he didn’t need a codgery old salvage yard owner too.

“Your brother. You wanna tell me where he is?”

“Do I look like I _know_ where he is?”

“Dean,” Bobby said, in the most even voice possible. “It ever occur to you that Sam has a tendency to die when not in your direct line of sight? And I ain’t speakin’ metaphorically.”

“What do you expect me to do, Bobby? Leash ‘im to the car?” Dean started to throw his hands up, but the painful pulse of his head reminded him that that was a bad idea and he aborted the motion. “The kid wanted to go off his own way. He always wants to go off his own way. You tell me how to keep him in one spot -- go ahead, I’m all ears.”

“He didn’t just stomp off out of the blue, Dean. _Some_ thing happened--” Bobby’s speech, thankfully, was interrupted by the ringing of one of his phones and he sighed. “My point, boy, is that as much as you want to pretend this is on Sam, the truth is that whatever it is that’s goin’ on has you drinkin’ yourself stupid in my living room. You don’t have to tell me what’s going on, it ain’t any of my business anyways, but until you’re out of my liquor cabinet, I have a vested interest in gettin’ you on your feet. So I’m gonna go answer my phone and you can sit here and think about whatever it was that you did.”

With that, Bobby turned, half heartedly tossing a hand up next to his head like Dean was a lost cause, and shit, he really was.

Thirty three years of live on this Earth and forty down below and what did he have to show for it?

A sweet ride that he wasn’t allowed to drive anymore, a hangover, and a missing brother. Not like he could really blame Sam this time, though.

He huffed. Technically, he couldn’t blame Sam _any_ of the times. He’d pretty much accepted the idea that wanting to go to college instead of risk your neck every night was a good thing ever since he’d helped Lisa set up Ben’s college fund. Still, he couldn’t help but worry. Sam was doing alright these days, but Dean had spent forty years in Hell, in the _nice_ Hell, and come out barely together -- Sam had almost two centuries under his belt, trapped in the darkest pit in the world with the Devil himself. That wasn’t something you just came back from.

And yet Sam was out there, wandering around alone. It was something that didn’t sit well with Dean’s big brother instincts on a good day and today was not that kind of day.

“Shit,” he heard Bobby say from the kitchen, and Dean looked up. _“Shit,”_ the older man said again, this time more emphatically. “No. No, Gunther. I said no, and don’t you dare.” A pause. “I know I didn’t and this is exactly why you trigger happy sumbitch. I didn’t want every uninformed idiot of a hunter out there with a rifle lookin’ to get their seven point buck.”

Dean sat forward on the couch, tipping his head to the side, but he wasn’t really in the hunting mood. Once, when he was younger, all he’d wanted to do with his life was hunt, to be a hero. Now he had a little more of a realistic understanding of things. Still, it sounded like whatever Bobby had, it was a big one.

“And I appreciate that you did,” Bobby continued, responding to something that Dean couldn’t hear. “But goddamnit, Gunther, don’t do this. I’m beggin’ you.”

And that’s when Dean’s interest became more than cursory, because Bobby wasn’t just saying that. He was _saying_ that. Meaning it. His voice had a gruff, pleading edge to it. Dean scooted forward on the couch.

“If you trust me at all, you’ll trust me on this: he’s not on the menu. Not for us. I’m sure as shit and you tell anyone else you come across that Bobby Singer said so. I don’t know how much clout my name carries these days, but whatever weight it does have I’m tellin’ you this: You _leave this one alone,_ Gunther. You leave it alone and you get out of town. You hear?”

There was a couple more rough sounds that seemed to form a goodbye, then the click of the plastic of the phone coming to rest on the hook and Bobby’s heavy footsteps brought him to the wide doorway that led from the kitchen to the living room. His face was grim and set, and Dean was already steeling himself, but he didn’t know what punch life could deliver him next.

“Bobby?” he asked, and Bobby responded:

“It’s Sam.”

And of course it was.

\-----

Bobby was crouched down by the old TV, adjusting the antenna as he flicked through the channels and Dean sat on the couch, elbows on his knees and fingers folded together, his lips pursed and jaw tight. His leg was vibrating a little, heel tapping arrhythmically against the creaky old floor, but his eyes were focused directly on the staticky screen.

The hangover felt a million miles away.

His first instinct, when Bobby told him that they’d got Sam, that Sam was in custody, was to jump in his car and drive straight across the country to Illinois and get Sam the hell out, but Bobby had had the gall to remind him that this was no country jail cell. This was Chicago. This was the _FBI._ Sam was in major time _custody._ National news kind of custody. And Dean was completely fucked.

“There, there!” Dean said suddenly when he saw a local news network flicker by and Bobby jumped at the shout, grumbling but turning back, adjusting the antenna until the image came through -- clear but grainy. It was a nice looking woman with nice looking make up sitting behind a desk, her hands clasped and her eyes bright and focused into the camera.

The type of person who had no idea what kind of monsters crawled around in the dark.

Also the type of person who didn’t work for a local news station -- they were carrying the feed from their national affiliate in Chicago, and it made Dean’s heart race and blood chill at the same time.

“The Winchesters began their bloody streak across the country in 2005, with the death of Sam Winchester’s then girlfriend, Jessica Lee Moore,” the talking head was saying, voice too chipper and Dean growled.

“You leave her the hell out of this,” he muttered, as if she could hear him. Jessica’s family didn’t need to be dragged into this, and Sam didn’t need anyone telling him that her blood was in his hands. He already thought that enough himself.

“Moore perished in a mysterious fire that left authorities baffled to explain, while the younger Winchester set off with his brother on what he told friends was a ‘road trip.’ Seven years and no less than three extremely convincing deaths later, it seems at least one Winchester was still at large until earlier today when he was apprehended here in Chicago, Illinois. As in so many cases of serial killers, it was the little things: sources tell us that the authorities caught up with Winchester when he began causing a scene in a diner where two police officers were enjoying their breakfast. Steven Parish is at the scene with more. Steven?” She finished talking, still staring straight into the camera when the feed was picked up and the screen split, showing a man about Dean’s age, hair slicked back and suit crisp and finer than any Dean owned. He was holding a mic in one hand and standing next to a middle aged man with a small gut and a receding hairline, his dower face looking at the reporter.

“Thanks Sandy,” the reporter said. “I’m here with Henry Whitford, a construction site worker, who was in the restaurant where Sam Winchester was arrested. Can you tell us about what happened? What tipped the officers off?”

He turned towards the man standing next to him, shifting the mic. Whitford looked slightly uncomfortable but spoke anyways.

“There’s not a lot to tell,” he said, a little older and a lot gruff, his words a little hard to make out through the mumbling and the accent, but Dean was determined. “Me and Ronnie, a coworker of mine, were just enjoying our breakfast at out regular joint when this guy in the corner starts making a ruckus. At first it’s just the usual, you know? They get some crazies in there, but Millie, our waitress, she’s looking a little spooked so I offer to get up and see what the problem is. Before I can the guy just goes nuts -- jumps out of his seat and is yelling at nothing.”

“How do you mean?” the reporter asks, his speech clearer, less inflected.

“I mean _nothing._ He was looking at the bench across from him, like someone was sitting there, but no one was. Ronnie goes to calm him down and he must have had a weapon hid on him somewhere, cause Ronnie goes flying back.”

“No,” Dean muttered, leaning forward in his seat. “No, no no--”

“Then I see two officers get up from the back and come forward. They’re telling him to calm down but they got their weapons drawn and I’m thinking things are about to get nasty. Then the guy just turns and looks out the window, like something more important is happening out there. When I saw the cops put him in cuffs, I’m not sure he even knew they were there.”

“So you think he was unbalanced?” the reporter asked, looking _eager,_ like Sam was just a story, and it didn’t matter that none of them knew Sam, didn’t remember him when he was twelve, fifteen, eighteen years old and fighting for his freedom. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know how heartbreaking it was when Sam cried, always messy and awful, like the world was ending, because even if they didn’t know, they were still wrong. How could they even look at Sam and see anything less than good?

“I can’t speak to that,” the older man replied, shaking his head. “All I can say is that I’ve known men who came back from war looking less empty than that kid. It was like there was nothing left in there anymore. That’s when I got Ronnie up off the floor and we got outta there. I didn’t find out until later that it was one of those Winchester killers.” 

“It must feel like a brush with death.”

“It felt like more than just that.” The man continued to shake his head, gaze fixed elsewhere. “I dunno what that man was there to do -- if he was planning on shooting up the joint like he and his brother did before, or what. But I tell you what, when I got out of that place, it felt like I could breathe again. It felt like I’d been in a room with the devil.”

“No, no, no, no--fuck!” Dean stood up, ignoring the babbling voices on the television, instead pacing across the messy floor of Bobby’s living room, one hand fisted in his short cropped hair. “Fuck, I shouldn’t have let him go, Bobby. I shouldn’t have let him--”

He cut himself off, shaking his head. Nausea curled in his gut. How the fuck was he going to get Sam out of this one? It was a _federal case_ and it wasn’t like Dean could waltz in there with a fake badge. They knew his face. No one was going to fall for Dean Winchester coming to get his brother out.

“What else were you going to do?” Bobby replied, trying to be comforting but failing. “He’s a grown man, Dean--”

“He’s a _kid!”_ Dean yelled back, spinning around to face the older hunter. “He’s a kid who just got back from nearly _two hundred years_ in Hell, and I let him walk off cause he was pissed at me. I let him walk off cause I--” He cursed again, lifting a hand to cover his face. “Cause I always do this. I mess up and I lose sight of him and then something awful happens.”

For a second he can still taste the bitter rain, can hear it hitting dull and empty against the mud in the middle of nowhere, parked outside some diner full of dead folk and Sam gone. For a second he can still feel the anger, the fear churning in him as he yelled Sam’s name into the night, already knowing his little brother was gone.

And finally getting him back as a corpse.

Dean took a haggard breath.

“Fuck.” He shook his head. “I gotta go after him. I gotta get him back.”

“Dean,” Bobby replied, obviously going for a voice of reason, but Dean knew that wasn’t going to work. It never worked. Not with him and Sam. They were something beyond that, and Dean didn’t care anymore. Bobby continued anyway. “There is no way that you’re going to be able to break him out of there. There’s a whole damned media circus going on and this isn’t some podunk town jail. This is Chicago. They’re gonna have him in lock up and surrounded by more cops and guards than you can spit at. You can’t sneak in and you sure as hell can’t shoot your way in. The only thing you have going for you right now is that they think you’re dead.”

“Oh c’mon, they know I’m not. This is the _third time_ I’ve come up dead, and if Sam’s alive, they’re going to know I am too. They’re going to be drilling him in some interrogation room, and they’re going to think it’s okay ‘cause they have no idea, no fucking _idea,_ that the kid’s just trying to deal with the goddamned Devil whispering in his ear.” Dean clenched his jaw, the imagery painting ugly in his head, his little brother stooped over and just trying to hold on while a cop got up in his face, asking where Dean was, all the while Satan hissing whatever bullshit would break Sam fastest.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t really Lucifer, that was all in Sam’s head. 

It was real enough.

Dean had tasted Hell, knew just how long it lasted, how long it stuck to someone’s skin, and Dean went to Disney World compared to Sam. Dean’s fingers curled into fists and it felt like every muscle in his body was tense, rigid with rage and loss.

“So, tell me then,” Bobby said, voice tetchy with skepticism, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s your plan?”

Dean didn’t have one and he knew it. He also just didn’t care. He was opening his mouth to tell Bobby just that when the image on the TV screen changed -- it was an overhead shot, something from a helicopter, and down on the street there was a crowd waiting, building. The camera zoomed in, picked up the dark figures descending from the building, walking down the white marble stairs.

Dean knew it was Sam before he saw him.

The kid was leaned over, his height obscured by his bent head, his shoulders stretched with his hands cuffed behind his back, a cop on either side, their hands on his elbows and leading him like an animal, a criminal. Dean couldn’t hear the crowd over the blades of the chopper, but he could imagine what the words might be.

All Dean could think was: _This is the man who saved the world._

He walked around the couch stiffly, coming to stand between it and the TV, trying to soak in the sight of his brother, trying to see his face, and god, he should never have let Sam go. He clenched his jaw.

Then the procession stopped, Sam’s feet planting, and it took a lot to move someone of Sam’s size, someone of Sam’s _strength,_ when they didn’t want to move. Dean could see the officers trying to move him, could see a couple others coming from behind, and what has to be the ADA turning around in front. 

The shot changed to one down on the street and Dean could hear the yelling now, a thousand different questions, all of them fading into meaningless noise. Dean could catch snippets, things like ‘kill’ and ‘blood,’ things like ‘innocence’ and ‘murderer,’ but it was all too much sound, shouts overlapping until language was gone and there was nothing but the raw sound of the human voice, too much at once. Sam was a few feet up from the camera, still on the stairs. The mics from the front row of the reporters had been thrust up to the ADA, a professionally dressed woman with her hair done up and pinned primly to her head, and they were all treating this like was normal.

Dean knew before it happened that everything was about to go wrong.

“...shit,” he breathed, slipping to his knees to stare into the television, sitting directly in front of it.

Sam’s head jerked up and his eyes were black like tar, not possessed, though -- because Dean could see the golden ring of yellow burning through the darkness. His little brother’s birth right.

“Sam--” Dean said, like it could get through the screen.

And then words that weren’t words start coming out of Sam’s mouth. It was Sam’s voice, almost, but not quite. It was something grating and darker and Dean had heard every ancient language in the world and this was none of them.

“Mother of god,” Bobby muttered behind him but Dean was just staring.

Sam’s face broke, went full of pain and agony, his body twisting to the side, and there were tears running down his cheeks-- Jesus, couldn’t they see he was in pain? Dean reached out to the screen, hand smoothing out over the glass like he could reach in and touch. But all he felt was the faint static tingle of an old CRT.

Sam screamed, blood curdling and agonized, the sound ripped raw from his throat, like broken glass coming up and Dean flinched away, turned his head like if he didn’t have to look at it then it wasn’t happening. His baby brother was hundreds of miles away from him, breaking down in Bobby’s living room but Dean couldn’t touch him. He can’t do a damned thing. 

Just like when his dad died, just like when Sam died, just like always, Dean was powerless.

Sam pitched forward in the officers’ hands, the two of them having to brace themselves to hold his weight as he went limp, his stupid floppy hair hanging everywhere and obscuring his face. The image was jerky and compressed, Bobby’s TV too old and ill maintained to catch anything so minute, but Dean thought that Sam was trembling. The crowd was quieter now, everyone shutting up to listen, no one wanting to miss the _freak show._ Silence descended save for the snapping and clacking of cameras going off, the faint whine of mics too close together. One officer behind Sam had her hand on her weapon, still holstered but ready. 

It wouldn’t make a difference though.

When the ADA lifted her hand, reached out, Sam’s head snapped up, gold glowing bright through the darkness and she leapt back, gasping and fell to her knees, unable to catch herself on the stairs. The image held on Sam’s face, on the ragged lines of a man, a corpse, dragged through too much, and the image shook and blurred, went choppy through the middle. It began to wave back and forth, uneven, Sam looking up and into the camera, eyes glowing golden beautiful and mad, too filled with agony, disconsolate with despair, staring straight through the TV screen, straight into Dean--

And then everything vanished and Dean was left staring at the test pattern, stark, meaningless colored lines and the high pitched whine of no signal.

“No!” he yelled, hands coming up to clench on either side of the screen, grabbing it like that would make some kind of difference, like it could bring Sam back. He stared into the test pattern, trying to will it to show him his brother, but nothing materialized. “Bobby!” he called, head jerking to look over his shoulder.

For a minute the old man just stood there, then stumbled his way over.

“Goddamnit,” Dean grit out, angry at the world, angry at everything. “You couldn’t scrape together some cash for a TV that wasn’t from the sixties? This is _important--”_

“It ain’t _me,_ dumbass,” Bobby groused as he flicked through the channels, his voice still tight though. “This is comin’ from the other end.”

The screen switched through a couple of commercials, then some show, Dean’s eyes searching it every flick to try and see Sam. Bobby finally halted on what looked to be another news station, this one out of Sioux Falls. The anchors were talking about how they were having technical difficulty with their feed. Dean swallowed.

“...the other channel,” he said lowly, and Bobby looked back at him. Dean started again. “The other channel. They were broadcasting from their affiliate. The newsroom was located in Chicago, wasn’t it?”

He looked up at the older man, Bobby looking gravely down at him and saying nothing. He didn’t need to.

Whatever had happened, it had been big enough to wipe an entire station off of the air.

Dean felt cold, like his heart couldn’t pump heat anymore and his blood felt chilled in his veins, the hair on his arms raising. On the screen, the female anchor was handed a piece of paper. Dean could see her eyes browsing it, taking it in.

“We’re getting reports--” she started. “There appears to be a massive electrical storm over Chicago. Possibly the cause of our technical difficulties.”

 _“Oh_ boy...” Bobby said, the both of them knowing that whatever happened next wasn’t going to be good and wasn’t going to be anything that either of these pampered civvies could handle.

“We’re seeing now reports of a possible fire?” the male anchor spoke up, his expression confused. The co-host made some crack about signs of the apocalypse, but Dean didn’t even have the mirth to laugh. His hands were cupped over his mouth and nose, staring straight into the television. Waiting to see _Sam._

He and Bobby watched in silence as the two anchors stalled for time, talking more about the Winchesters, about Dean’s _family,_ like they had any right. Dean just sat there as two people who’d never known a day of real suffering in their lives talked about his mother, his father, talked about all the little snippets and guesses they had of his life, of Sam’s, and then began to drag Sam through the mud. It didn’t make it better that Sam would let them.

That Sam would let the world martyr him, if it made things better.

“Okay,” the woman announced, looking relieved as she straightened in her chair. “It looks like we’re getting some images of the events occurring in Chicago -- a possible blackout or malfunction -- but we now take you live to Barney on the outskirts of the city. Barney, can you tell us what’s going on?”

The video hung for an awkward moment, the two anchors sitting there, waiting, and then it cut, black and static replacing it, flickering and buzzing across the screen. There was a pause, the television feeling more like a presence in the room, empty and sentient, looking into them as they looked into it and the female anchor laughed nervously.

“Barney? You there?”

And in reply, a voice hissed brokenly through the speakers:

“No... _no.”_

And the camera jolted, pushing up and finally showing them the city.

The screen flickered and buzzed, the image uneven and shaking but from more than just the wind that Dean could hear howling down the mic. The anchors’ voices had drifted to silent and there was nothing else to say, the camera locked on to a city in the distance -- buildings rising up into the black clouds. It was day time. Middle of the damned afternoon. But the image looked like it had been taken at night, the sky like pitch and not a shaft of light coming through.

The city, though, shone with a light that made no sense, shone red and purple and _black,_ like light never could, and it looked like it was on fire even though it wasn’t at all. The clouds were growling overhead, roiling like the sea, like oil pinned against the sky. The buildings were rotting through like bad fruit, not falling apart but _decaying,_ living flesh growing up the walls and around the streetlamps.

It was only belatedly that Dean realized it wasn’t the wind howling at all. It was the distant sound of an entire city of people screaming. 

“What in god’s name is that...?” Bobby asked, voice low and breathy, the complete inability of a human who’d never been to Hell to recognize it. Dean had no such inability.

“It’s all the hell in his head,” he replied, remorse echoing hollow through him. All his life he’d tried to keep his brother safe. All his life he’d tried to keep Sam from living with the kind of darkness that Dean lived with. All his life, except for the two years that really counted. Everything except for the times when Dean punched him and pushed him away and called him a monster.

And this was the result. This was what Sam lived with, carried around with him -- a kind of maw that no human, not even Dean, could ever truly comprehend. A kind of darkness that went beyond shadows and pain and deep into madness, writhing and inhuman. And now Chicago was burning in a way it never had before: screams rising up like smoke and horror dancing like flames. And when Sam came around, _if_ Sam came around, he was going to hate himself even more for this, even though it wasn’t, had never _been,_ his fault.

Dean pulled in a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and shuddered through it, pushing himself stolidly to his feet. 

“I have to go,” he announced, shaking his head at nothing at all. On the television Chicago was still wailing, glowing with an impossible sickness that the meager man made technology in the screen trembled to depict, the television buzzing as it tried to carry a signal that defied every natural law in this world. Something that wasn’t _from_ this world. Somewhere in that mess was Sam and he needed Dean. There wasn’t any other hunter who could walk through Hell but him.

“Dean--” Bobby said, probably trying to stop him, but Dean brushed him off, moving around the couch to search for his bags in the mess and debris of the living room. He found his duffel, overflowing with clean laundry that had been dumped there, probably meant to make Dean feel guilty enough to get off of his drunk ass and fold it, but instead Dean was shoving it in bulky and awkward, uncaring as he zipped the bag shut. He grabbed for whatever weaponry he could find around, the guns that had been disassembled and cleaned, the knives laid out on the table. He didn’t know how much he’d be able to take with him, or how far the car would get in a mess like that, but there was no sense in not grabbing what he could while he could.

He shoved some flares and rope into the weapons bag as well, along with a few MREs. He’d have to stop at a gas station along the way to get water bottles. 

“You can’t just drive out into that.” Bobby’s voice was stern and tight, the kind of parental tone that he thought would work for some reason, but both of them were grown men, Dean no longer a child and hadn’t been for years. He’d gotten over ‘yes sir’ing his way through life a long time ago. He didn’t deserve to be treated like the man’s kid.

With forty years of Hell under his belt and thirty besides that, Dean was older than Bobby.

“Sam’s there,” he answered baldly, zipping up the supplies and weapons duffel. He didn’t need to give Bobby, or anyone else, any other answer. Sam was out there and Dean wasn’t just going to sit around and watch his little brother burn again. 

“Damnit, boy,” Bobby near growled, watching as Dean strode passed him and to the hallway. “You have no idea what’s out there. No idea what’s going on. Don’t be a fool. What the hell do you think you’re gonna do once you get there?”

Dean paused in the hallway, looking down its length at the door to the front porch, the door that led to the Impala and the road and Sam. His head was still vaguely throbbing with hangover and the alcohol was still just slightly burning in his veins but they didn’t seem like the overwhelming things they had before. He’d been through worse in his life, both his earthly one and the one below. He and Sam had been through hell and high water for each other, made deals with the devil and messed up more than just the natural order of things. They’d proven, time and time again, that ‘good’ only mattered when one of them wasn’t in danger, and now wasn’t that time.

They did the right thing, played the good guys only so long as they were both safe. But when one of them was on the line, all bets were off. 

And Dean had tried normal. Healthy. He’d tried boundaries and independence. He’d tried the armchair psychology and emotional stability and tried not being so wrapped up in his brother that he felt like he was going to die and it hadn’t even felt like living at all. Living with Sam, being family with Sam, was like living on the edge of a precipice, hands clasped together and each of them holding one another up, and both with the knowledge that they could let go and walk away, but only if they let the other one fall.

Dean had let go more than once over the last few years. Sam never had.

And that was what Dean’d done this time. He’d been so wrapped up _his_ pain, _his_ loss, _his_ sorrow, that he’d thrown it all in his brother’s face, made out like it was all okay because Sam was crazy and Dean wasn’t and that was that. Sam was carrying the weight of Hell around in his head and yet Dean was the one drinking to get through the day. 

Dean knew he could stay here. He could stay here and watch from the safety of Bobby’s living room as Sam went nuclear, watch as his little brother built a whole new cage, a whole new Hell here on Earth, all to torture himself with, and Dean would be fine. Dean could watch it all through a screen and lose himself in a bottle and besides a little liver damage never be worse for wear.

And maybe that was the better thing to do. The normal thing to do. The thing that families with boundaries and limits and self-worth did, but fuck that.

Winchesters didn’t need any of that. 

Dean’s lip curled up, a grimace of a smile, hard but determined.

“I’m gonna do what I always do,” he replied, sparing Bobby only one more glance before he left. “I’m gonna go and get my brother back.”


End file.
